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All in the mind

TO GET the most out of caffeine, you’ve got to believe in the effect it’s
having on you. “It seems that what you think may be as important as what you
drink,” Andrew Scholey, a psychopharmacologist at the University of Northumbria,
told a meeting of the British Psychological Society in Winchester last week.

Scholey and his colleagues told a group of coffee drinkers they were either
going to be given caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee. But only half of each
group got the drink they expected. The others were deliberately given the wrong
type of coffee.